With this email I'm opening the first week of November, when sea bass reopen. November first through the fifth will be regular trips, the 6th we'll stay longer as we often do on Saturdays.

Spots are wide open - there are no previous reservations.

I'm also opening this Wednesday-coming to a long tog trip - A sampling trip, October 13th, we'll be gone from 6:30 to 4:30 - Limit 14 people. $100 regular fare.

Also going to go long on Oct 14, 15, 16 -- from 6:30 am to 4pm -- Flounder/fluke on wrecks & reefs - Even some drifting despite that I catch most of my flounder on anchor. We haven't had the weather to catch them this fall -now finally settling- I think they're out there. 18 people sells the boat out - $120 fare.

Weeding through two years of cbass production for 12 1/2 inch fish in late fall is a workout.

I witnessed the sea bass population proliferate with no recreational creel limit and a smaller size limit through the late 90s & early 2000s.

I witnessed the sea bass population fall in a heap in early 2004 as regulations drew ever tighter.

Now rebounding in our region, we need management to redirect their efforts to where real problems lie.

Indeed, the statistics that brought us the upcoming cbass closure are at the heart of our current regulatory troubles. The old recreational catch statistics program, MRFSS, is dead - yet haunting.

And there's reef-fishes' inconvenient habit of living only where there's reef.

..and that we use a 'coastwide stock' - a single coastal population model - in the management of a fish that might migrate as much as 40 to 60 miles offshore only to return, not just to the same reef, but the same spot on that reef.

Never coastwide.

I think it's very poor use of management's might given the possibilities.